I have before me a letter from Jeremy Rifkin, author of Entropy: A New World View. His communication states that "entropy helps explain why we have runaway inflation, soaring unemployment, bloated bureaucracies, a widely escalating energy crisis, and worsening pollution." That sentence is an archetypical example of the patent intellectual nonsense being offered in applying physics to the social sciences. Entropy, a deep and hard-to-penetrate physical construct, is being indiscriminately applied to situations in which it is devoid of physical meaning. No hint is given that the far-from-equilibrium world in which we live is governed by different laws than the thermodynamics learned in an introductory physics course. Boltzmann's work of a hundred years ago is ignored, as are numerous works of modern science showing the antientropic character of energy flow processes.
In short, entropy is being made a code word to explain every political idea Rifkin wishes to propound. This ...
